Despite what you might have seen or not seen, there are actually some fireflies living west of the Rocky Mountains, though they mostly keep to themselves and are rarely spotted by humans. Every once in a while, people spot some. This time, one undergrad who was busy insect hunting in the Los Angeles County hit the jackpot after he discovered a new firefly species.

An international team of more than 100 scientists has undertaken a most complex and challenging task: they’ve determined the timings and patterns of evolution for most of the insect family tree, until they arrived at at the original insect foremother which lived some 500 million years ago. Thus, the researchers were able to pinpoint when the major insect groups, most still

In a breakthrough in robotics, researchers have programmed a swarm consisting of a whooping 1,024 members which can assemble in programmable 2-D shapes. The demonstration might provide insights in how natural self-assembling swarms operate, like ants who join up to form bridges for the good of the colony.

A while ago, Andrei published a post in which he uploaded and spoke about seven key charts that show plain and simple that global warming is real and man-made, unless you know of another perturbing climate factor other than humans capable of producing the same effects. Like I said, plain and simple – for those reasonable to listen. But don’t

We all had our various obsessions as children, but most of us grew out of them and went on to get sensible jobs and take up sensible hobbies… not so Matt Denton from Winchester in Hampshire, UK. Matt’s company Micromagic Systems worked for four years to build a 2-tonne, driveable, turbo diesel hexapod monster which it describes as “the biggest

Some of you might find it surprising to hear that a lot of animals engage in homosexual behavior. Close to 1,500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, have been observed engaging in such behavior and this is well documented for 500 of them. No one comes close to insects and spiders, though, which have a significantly larger homosexual/hetero ratio

The Issus coleoptratus or issus for short is a small hopping insect that can leap at tremendous speeds and lengths compared to its tiny size. Actually, it’s one of the fastest accelerating creatures known to biologists, capable of accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. To achieve this fascinating feat the issus performs

While browsing reddit the other day, I came across a most peculiar finding. One of the users, Decapod73 or Tony Alexander in real life, posted photos he took while on an expedition in the Peruvian Amazon forest of intricate structures that bear an uncanny resemblance to a white picket circular fence – right in the center, half of a cocoon lays proud

The dung beetle is an extreme survivor. Not only does it feed on poop, but it also fashions a hefty ball out of it, up to 50 times its own mass, that it rolls through the scorching desert. We’re talking 60 degrees Celsius here. A new study that has closely followed this truly remarkable creature has found that the dung

Paleontologists have uncovered the fossil remains of a 3-inch-long extinct arthropod in Yunnan Province, China, dating from the Cambrian period. What makes it particularly special is the fact that it provides an unusual example of preservation of the brain and nervous system, atypical for fossil records this old, but most interestingly it suggests that complex brains evolved much earlier than

Defense, like offence, is expensive for any animal. It takes resources and a lot of energy, and for some, it even comes at an ultimate sacrifice. Such is the case of a species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana. There, worker termites, after they age and are no longer capable of serving the colony at their full potential,

Scientists have uncovered pieces of fossilized amber containing tiny female insects called thrips, which upon closer inspections were found to have particles of pollen dusted over them. The insects found are around 100 million years old, officially making them the oldest pollination record ever found. During the lower Cretaceous Period, which corresponds to the recently discovered fossilized thrips, the world’s flowering

Last year, we reported on one of the most gruesome and horrific acts that goes on in nature; it seems so unreal, like if some sort of SciFi monstrous scenario transcended into the realm of reality, that one has a hard time wrapping his head around it. Yes, as some of you might have read previously, I’m talking about the zombie-ant fungus

Neurons are the absolute core components of the nervous system that transmit information through electrical and chemical signals. I once wondered how neural activity might sound like, and I imagined something like a huge gridline sprinkled with electricity bolts though out. I didn’t know about the SpikerBox, back then, though. It’s a gadget, developed by educational entrepreneurs Timothy Marzullo and Gregory